Sarah Z. Creates

In this World-Building Wednesday series, I’m doing just that: fleshing out Talah, one of the worlds in The Sundered Realms.

My mother named me Kana, because I was so small, no one believed I had the strength to survive. But I did. I survived and I grew, though I was always small. My brothers called me Cho, because I looked as tiny as a butterfly. I loved it, at first, because butterflies are beautiful, but as they grew bigger and stronger and left me out of their games because I was too small to keep up, I hated it.

“You can’t come!” Kenji yelled as I pumped my legs faster to keep up. “It will be over by the time you get there!” And he pushed me down in the dirt. “Stay put or go home, Cho. You’re too little.”

I don’t remember how old I was that day I watched Kenjin and his friends run into the village and leave me behind. But as the hot tears burned down my dusty cheeks, I only then understood that small could feel big and sharp.

It was a lesson I learned well over the years: when I was too small to help my father in the fields, so I helped my mother with the stitching instead. When I was too small to travel safely to the secondary school in Edo, the next village over, so my learning ended at 10. And when I was too small for any man who wanted strong sons, so I was still unwed at 19.

Benga, though, never thought that I was small. He never thought that I was anything other than perfect, even though my hips were narrow, my hair was gray and I struggled with the weight of the water bucket I carried from the well each day.

And oh, how I loved that great-hearted man. I was so proud he chose me that I didn’t mind leaving our village behind when his need to work drove us into the city. I was so proud to bear him a son, Thomas, that I didn’t mind slowly spending away our savings because even the work we both did wasn’t enough to shelter, clothe and feed the three of us. Not and pay off the goons that “protected” us.

And I was so proud to be married to a man brave enough to say “no” when the choice was between feeding our son and paying off the goons.

And that’s how my Benga died, and my pride burned, and the first time I realized, truly, just how small I was.